Video: Of course we’d invite Hitler to speak, says Columbia dean

posted at 6:47 pm on September 22, 2007 by Allahpundit

Webloggin’s also on this. I have it in my head somehow that Dwight Eisenhower, when offered the opportunity to personally accept the surrender of a German general, refused. So unspeakably loathsome did he find the Nazis that he wouldn’t dignify them with his presence, even at the moment of triumph. I can’t find an account of that online, though. Anyone able to help?

The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so over powering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

Note what Coatsworth says about there being no shortage of willing media outlets. Hard to argue with that.

The German government tried to surrender to the Western Allies only. On May 6 Colonel General Alfred Jodi was flown to SHAEF headquarters in Rheims, France, to negotiate a surrender. Eisenhower refused to negotiate a separate capitulation to the West, and he refused to deal with Jodi in person. To Eisenhower, Jodi was not really a soldier, and the German military was not worthy of the respect given to real soldiers, sailors, and airmen. He believed it was part of a gangster regime that stained the honor of soldiers. With little negotiating leverage, Jodi accepted Eisenhower’s terms on May 7. Officially, at midnight as May 8 began, Germany surrendered to the Western Allies and Russians alike. At the insistence of the Russians, however, a second surrender ceremony took place in Berlin later on the 8th.